Books about clones sneak an old question into a shiny package. Forget the lab coats and the glowing tanks for just a second. Underneath, every clone story is pretty much asking the same thing: if someone made you on purpose, for a reason, do you still get to be a person?
That question has bugged me for ages, mostly because I spent a long time writing a book where two young guys have to hide what they are from a man who has already decided for 'em. More on that at the end. First, here are seven novels that take the idea somewhere cool...from quiet and heartbreaking to loud and pretty unhinged.
Why books about clones get under our skin
Robots are easy to keep at a distance. They're metal, they beep, somebody built them in a factory. (I wrote about them in my post on androids in fiction, if you want the circuitry version of this conversation.) A clone is a bit harder to shrug off. A clone bleeds, sulks, falls in love (and has your exact nose - whoop there it is).
So the stories tend to circle a few fears. Am I replaceable? Is a copy worth less than the original? And who decided there was an "original" in the first place? The best ones don't answer neatly. They hand you a character you can't help loving and let you stew.
7 clone novels worth your time
1. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
My top fav for sure. This is the quiet one, and the one that will wreck you. Kathy H. looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, an English boarding school where the students make art, trade gossip and slowly piece together what they were raised for. There are no chase scenes and no evil scientist monologues. It reads like a memoir about school friends, which is exactly why it hurts. If you only read one book on this list, this is the one.
2. The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
The YA classic. Matt is the clone of El Patrón, an ancient drug lord who rules a strip of poppy fields called Opium, wedged between the United States and what used to be Mexico. Most people on the estate treat Matt like an animal. El Patrón treats him like a favorite, and it takes Matt a while to understand why. It won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor, and it has aged very well.
3. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm
An older one that deserves more readers. As the world falls apart and people stop being able to have children, one large family in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley turns to cloning to keep going. It works. The trouble is what the clones become after a few generations of growing up in identical groups, and what they lose along the way. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1977, and it's less about science than about why being one of a kind matters.
4. The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
A domestic thriller with a clone in the kitchen. Evelyn Caldwell is a brilliant researcher whose life's work is cloning. Her husband has used that work to make Martine, a gentler, more agreeable version of Evelyn herself. Then things go wrong and the two women need each other. It's sharp and uncomfortable, and it's really about the versions of ourselves other people would prefer.
5. Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
The funny one. Mickey Barnes is an Expendable on an ice-world colony, which means he gets the jobs nobody is supposed to survive, and a fresh copy of him is printed out each time he doesn't. Then the seventh Mickey makes it home from a mission everyone assumed had finished him, and finds Mickey8 already in his bunk. Two Mickeys is very much against the rules. (Yes, this is the book behind the film Mickey 17.)
6. Kiln People by David Brin
A detective story in a world where everyone can bake a clay copy of themselves each morning. The copies, called dittos, last about a day, run your errands, and then you load their memories back into your own head. Private investigator Albert Morris sends out several of himself at once, and the book follows each of them. It's a strange, playful take on the idea, and it asks whether a you that only lives until dinner still counts.
7. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Only one of this novel's six nested stories is about clones, but it earns its place here. Sonmi~451 is a fabricant, grown to serve customers at a fast-food counter in a future Korea, and her section is told as an interview about how she woke up to her own life. If the whole book feels like a lot, you can honestly read her story for its own sake.
What the best clone stories have in common
Reading these close together, a few patterns jump out.
- Somebody has drawn a line. There's always a rule about who counts: students versus "normal" people, Expendables versus crew, originals versus copies. The plot starts when a character notices the line and asks who put it there.
- The clone is the most human person in the room. Matt, Kathy and Sonmi are more curious and more tender than the people who made them. That's the point.
- Love is the test. Not a lab test. The moment a clone loves someone, or is loved back, the argument that they're "just a copy" stops working.
That last one is why clone stories sit so comfortably next to found family stories. If nobody gave you a family, you build one.
Where my books fit: Eden's Maze
My own contribution to the pile is Thunder's Rhyme and in particular, Eden's Maze, book two of The Last Planet (you can read it without book one).
Griffin wakes up behind iron bars in a settlement called Eden, and the first thing his boyfriend Luke tells him is to lie. They're clones, and Max, the man in charge, doesn't think clones are human. He even has a test for it. So Griffin and Luke pretend to be ordinary brothers, which is its own kind of awkward, because Eden isn't friendly to boys who love boys either.
Then Griffin meets a stranger with his exact face, right down to the mismatched eyes, one brown and one blue-violet. Each of them is sure he's the original. I won't tell you who's right. I will say there's a dance floor involved.
If you like your sci-fi with a love story at the center, I also put together a list of gay sci-fi adventure books a while back.
Your turn
Which clone story got to you? And the question I can't stop asking people: if you met a copy of yourself tomorrow, would you want to be friends, or would you find them deeply annoying? Tell me in the comments.
Happy reading, MSK